Corrective feedback in the chatroom: An experimental study

This paper replicates in a synchronous learning environment a study that looked at the effectiveness of providing two types of corrective feedback to students in the classroom. Elementary learners of L2 English (N = 31) completed two communicative tasks, during which time they received either recasts (implicit feedback) or metalinguistic information (explicit feedback) in response to any utterance that contained an error in the regular past tense. A third group served as a control. Learning was measured by timed and untimed grammaticality judgement tests. Results, which contrast with that of the original study, show no statistically significant gains in response to either type of feedback. An examination of chatscripts suggests some possible reasons as to why learning, as measured on the tests used, did not take place in a computer-mediated communicative context.